Space.

In the 1960s it was the final frontier. President Kennedy made speeches about going there. TV shows set their stories there. Young kids dreamed of growing up to live on a distant world filled with jet packs, hover cars, and robot maids.

In the wake of the Sputnik satellite blazing across the sky in 1957, we started throwing everything out into space: dogs, monkeys, William Shatner. But one of the most important items dispatched upwards to break the surly bonds was a three-foot wide globe of metal that looked like a disco ball at Prince’s house.

The summer of 1962 saw the launch of Telstar, the first global communications satellite. It provided the first live transatlantic television broadcast, the first satellite telephone call, and the first relay of computer data. If the telegraph was the first shot fired by globalization, Telstar was the atom bomb.

As usual, record-makers immediately got to work in order to take advantage of the publicity. In this case, UK producer Joe Meek was first to the launchpad.

Meek was an iconoclast, to say the least, and one of the first independent producers in the UK at a time when most of them worked for the major record labels. He had always shown a keen interest in electronics — partly spurred on by working as a radar technician for the RAF — curious not only about how things worked, but how electronics could alter natural sounds in different ways and produce their own otherworldly noises if tweaked in the right manner. This willingness to experiment led to many unique and unusual hits.

In 1961, Meek hired five musicians to become the unnamed house band for his studio, playing on sessions for different artists, and eventually backing Billy Fury as The Tornados. Instrumental guitar rock was huge in England at this time, primarily due to the string of hits by Cliff Richard’s former backing band, The Shadows. Meek hoped The Tornados might find the same kind of success, and to achieve this goal, he wrote them an au courant song.

“Telstar” brought together all of Meek’s obsessions: futurism, technology, electronics, weird sounds, and outer space. The Tornados provided the basic rhythm and melody and then Meek and his sonic tweaking built it into the kind of production soundscape that would become commonplace during the garage/psychedelic era a few years later. In the early 60s, however, it was anything but common.

Released as a single in the fall of 1962, “Telstar” rocketed to #1 in the UK, and a couple of months later topped the charts in the US, thereby making The Tornados the first UK group to reach #1 in the US. The band continued recording for a few more years until their brand of instrumental rock fell out of favor. (Fun fact: guitarist George Bellamy is the father of Matt Bellamy, lead singer of popular rock band Muse. Second fun fact: Telstar continues to orbit Earth — it doesn’t do anything, but it’s up there, floating like a miniature, bedazzled Death Star.)

So boldly go … with The Tornados.